Left: Family members of victims grieve near Sandy Hook Elementary School. Right: People take part in a vigil outside St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Conn. (CNS photos)

I got a late start yesterday morning and didn't hear the
news until a few hours after it broke. My wife had an appointment, and so I
made breakfast for our three (home schooled) children, ages four, eight, and
twelve. When I first read of the assault and massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut, I felt ill. It was gut wrenching. I thought for
a bit about our three children: “What if…?” I couldn't fathom the horrible
news, and yet, honestly, it didn't shock me. Just a few days ago, a young man
opened fire in the Clackamas Town Center in Portland, Oregon, just two hours
north of us, where years ago my wife worked when we were first married. Three
people were shot, two of them fatally; the 22-year-old murderer then took his
own life.

I also thought back to May 1998, when a fifteen-year-old
boy, Kip Kinkel, opened fire at Thurston High School, just a few short miles
from where I lived and worked. Two students were killed, and many more injured,
before Kinkel was subdued by seven of his fellow students. The evening prior,
Kinkel had murdered his parentsboth of them teacherswith guns his father had
purchased for him, along with a stolen gun he had bought from a friend.

And then I thought back to another young boy, who had been
raised around gunslots of them. His father was a gunsmith, and there were
numerous guns in his father's shop, as well as gunsmostly hunting riflesin
the house. The boy assumed everyone had guns and used them for hunting and
target practice, in large part because nearly everyone he knew did exactly
that. There were two fatal shootings in his hometown during his childhood, both
of them suicides by men overwhelmed by alcoholism and other problems. He was
never tempted to shoot anyone with a gun; in fact, the very thought was as
revolting and it was ridiculous, as he and his friends took seriously the
privilege of having and shooting a gun, just as they took seriously the
injunction, “Thou shalt not murder.”

Yes, I was that young
boy. And I thought of my childhood again when, just a few hours after the
shootings in Connecticut, I received an e-mail from the lefty group, Catholics
United, containing the following:

Catholics United Executive Director
James Salt released the following statement in reaction to this morning’s mass
shooting in Newtown, Conn.:

"Today’s shooting is yet another
horrific marker in a seemingly endless cycle of gun violence in America. As we
mourn the dead and send thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims of
this senseless act, we know prayer alone is not enough.

"As Catholics who support the
social justice achievements of this President, we are disappointed in his lack
of action in working to prevent these heinous acts of violence. We call on
President Obama to find the courage to lead our nation and help bring a true
and lasting end to gun violence.

"We need an immediate national
dialogue on preventing yet another American family from having to go through
Christmas without the loved ones they lost to gun violence. When will we stop
setting the price of our freedoms at the blood of innocent children? We pray
our elected leaders have the courage to face up to intransigent special
interests and engage in a serious discussion of how to end--permanently--the
cycle of gun violence in America."

Yes, indeedwhen we will have a serious discussion about the
blood of innocent children? When will we face up to the violence that takes
place on a regular basis against the youngest and most vulnerable among us?
When will the cycle of daily violence against young boys and girls cease? When?

I’m not going to chastise or dismiss Catholics United for
demanding stronger gun control laws. That is well within the group’s rights,
and it is a legitimate position good Catholics are free to take, even if
Catholics United also take a number of positions that are directly contrary to
the clear and consistent teachings of the Church. What I do take exception to
are the selective, perhaps even cynical, displays of concern by such groups.

To be fair, statements such as the one above are media-savvy
mirrors of the broader culture and of the deeply engrained double-mindedness
our nation has tolerated, then legalized, and now promotes with an irrational
fervor.

Consider that when a man dressed in black comes into a room
with unsuspecting children in it and takes their lives by violence and
bloodshed, we are shocked, outraged, angered, saddened, confused, and deeply
grieved. But when a man dressed in white comes into a room with an unsuspecting
child in it and takes that child’s life by injecting him with poison, or
ripping him to shreds, and removing him from his mother’s womb, we are usually
one of three things: oblivious, apathetic, or supportive.

We recognize the actions of the man in black as a grave
offense against life and goodness and the fiber of society. But we insist the
actions of the man in white is a matter of choice and preference and even
necessary for the good oftake your pickthe mother, the father, society at
large, an overpopulated planet, or even the child! (“It would be cruel”, it is
said with insane seriousness, “to bring a child into a life of poverty.” I
suspect that our three children, all adopted, would disagree.)

We flirt with the angels and dance with the devil, and then
insist that doing so is a sign of our courageous moral principles, our
enlightened and sensitive souls, and our advanced rational state. The fact is,
we are a nation with half a soul, embracing the good with one hand while clinging
to evil with the other. The outpouring of grief, sympathy, and solidarity on
Friday was a powerful display of America’s goodness, reminding me in many ways
of the care and concern demonstrated by strangers and neighbors alike after the
attacks on September 11, 2001.

But we are a deeply confused people, rightly denouncing the
murder of innocents on one day while self-righteously defending (or even
jubilantly celebrating) the murder of innocents the next. There are many
reasons for our nation’s double-mindedness, beginning with the fundamental
reality of sin, the age old and continual rebellion against moral order,
justice, and truth. Another is that we often fail to comprehend how close we
always live to the line separating civilization from chaos. False security has
a way of breeding fuzzy thinking and flawed morality. “The barbarism of the new
era”, wrote Abp. Fulton Sheen over sixty years ago, while World War II still
raged, “will not be like that of the Huns of old; it will be technical,
scientific, secular, and propagandized. It will not come from without, but from
within, for barbarism is not outside us; it is underneath us. Older civilizations
were destroyed by imported barbarism; modern civilization breeds its own.”

Our particular civilization also breeds choreographed
political gestures and tightly constructed technocratic solutions. Sure, material
solutions to social ills and spiritual crises have a place, but they only go so
far. Sheen, again, is instructive: “Because the world assumes that evil is
wholly external or social, it falsely believes that its remedy lies in the
domain of politics and economics since they deal with the externals or with
what a man has rather than what he is.” All of us are fallen creatures, possessing free
will, capable of both great acts of love and stunning acts of evil. Which means
that while practical steps can help limit some actions or contain certain
consequences, they cannot eradicate the daunting mysteries of free will and
evil.

Finally, Sheen’s statement that modern civilization breeds
its own barbarism brings us to another fact often ignored or dismissed quickly,
one that speaks directly to the crumbling of a civilization and the corrosion
of spiritual life: the collapse of familial stability. After the Clackamas
shooting, The Oregonian published a
piece titled, “Mall
gunman Jacob Roberts' short life included family betrayal, fragile home life.”
The details are unique to Roberts, but the basic issues are as familiar as they
are sad: a young man who “endured the death of his mother, a family betrayal, a
fragile home life marked by mental illness and marijuana and a series of failed
career plans that left his future unsettled.” But perhaps the most telling line
was simply, “He never knew his father.” How often does such a background result
in a young woman deciding to abort her child? How often does it conclude
abruptly with a young man exploding in rage, or snuffing out his life with
drugs or with suicide? Mental illness, divorce, and family strife also
appear to be key factors in Lanza’s short and troubled life.

In the end, it comes full circle, back to the nature of man
and the reality of sin, something Bl. John Paul II discussed at length in his
“Gospel of Life”. “In fact,” he wrote,

while the climate of widespread
moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity
of today's social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective
responsibility of individuals, it is no less true that we are confronted by an
even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin.
This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies
solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of
death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic
and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned
with efficiency.

Gun control advocates insist that those who deny the
importance of limiting or outlawing certain guns aren’t willing to face facts.
But those who would condemn (rightly, of course) the murders of children and
adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School while declaring abortion and euthanasia
matters of “choice”, fraught with complexity and moral ambiguity are (wittingly
or not) selling their souls for a mess of politically-expedient porridge. They
will talk constantly of “making sense of what happened”and some will also
refer in some way to “being efficient” in doing so but they cannot make sense
of it without taking the true measure of sin, which is, as Sheen observed, “the
deliberate eviction of Love from the soul. Sin is in the enforced absence of
Divinity.” And until we admit as much and are honest about the culture of death,
our nation will continue to lose its soul, one innocent soul at a time.

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